First, he chose for his heater a large beautiful cast iron air tight door with a panorama “bay window” shape. He also chose to have us design a current state of the art prototype hand built firebox to introduce over draft air in twenty-four separate air ports. In addition, he chose to add to his heater design a little known cast iron needle bed heat exchanger system from Finland that picks up super heated hot air off the top of the heater and sends it out by fan to a box beyond the heater where the hot air heat is converted to hot water heat and then pumped to remote areas of the house. And finally, Sampsa had heard about some soapstone mined in Finland and he wanted to try to get some to use in his heater. This needle bed heat exchanger will be discussed in an upcoming blog.

The last three items I will discuss separately in future blogs. But today I want to talk about the door. The door was hinged on the right and opened from the left and springs on the hinges allowed it to swing back to the nearly closed position after it was opened for loading wood. For safety reasons the handle was removable. A single pane of beautifully molded ceramic glass covered the three facets of the door. Air wash draft controls allowed air to wash up and down the face of the door.

Unfortunately, most masonry is made out of rectangular modules. A panorama door creates a special challenge, not simply because of its bay window shape, but because there is no easy way to step out self supported brick modules over the top of the door. The door of a heater is gasketed and while secured with tap con screws or other means, is not supporting any of the masonry above it. If it did, it would push on the masonry and crack it when the fire heated up the mass.

This means that the bay window shape of masonry above the door that spans the door has to be supported another way. Reviewing many photos of heaters built by others with panorama doors, we noted that many of them were made with soapstone blocks where stones above a fire door can be laterally connected to stones on the left and right with pins and clips allowing them in some sense to hang in mid air over the door without sitting on the door frame itself.

In brickwork for our five sided and six sided heaters that we have built, we have the two 135 degree angles to either side of the loading door and we typically carry the faceted shape all the way to the top of the heater. In addition, we typically mount a one plane door on just the front facet of these heaters and are not using a door that wraps, in a sense, around three facets of masonry. You can see a good example of this in the photo on the left of the Belanger masonry heater we built a decade or more ago.

These doors are mounted on a flat front facet. We, none the less have to bridge across the lintel opening, so we have done this two ways. One is to make a three piece welded angle iron which follows the shape of the three front facets and which spans the door opening from the back face of the veneer and turns left and right beyond the door opening to follow the two 135 degree angle facets of the brickwork. The angle iron has to be welded very accurately and at the ends of the angle iron we always lay down a strip of l/4 inch mineral wool to leave the metal some room to expand (as the metal is potentially moving in two directions because of the welded shape).

We also put down a strip of high temp ribbon gasket on the special faceted angle iron lintel and lay the bricks dry on the angle iron. We have had fairly good success with this approach but do not like it as much as our second option which is to span the door opening with a “jack arch” where the spring stone for each side of the arch actually starts on each side facet beyond the opening and then picks up the lateral thrust of the arch right at the corners of the front facet where the jack arch begins, which you can see in the above photo. The spring stone we typically make out of soapstone, which is easy to work with a 135 degree polished angle on it to match the angled brick we are using above and below it. We step the back half of the soapstone spring stone so that the brick coursing of two courses works perfectly into it. Once the arch is laid and the form removed, this approach gives us a reliable flat arch lintel over the door with no odd shaped metal angle iron to depend upon. You can also see such an arch in the photo of the Belanger heater above.

With a panorama door the front facet we are working with is only about l6.5 inches wide and typically, the facet does not go all the way up the face of the heater so we are essentially stuck with making something that follows the door shape in the brickwork below and above the door, but not necessarily all the way up the heater and including the oven door. In Sampsa’s case we wanted to not make an angle steel lintel on such a short facet and run the risk of the lintel causing cracking problems even if we gasketed it thoroughly. Furthermore, the oven door that Sampsa chose, he and we wanted to mount on a flat facet all the way across the front of the heater. So we basically needed to design the bay window facet for the first third or so of the heater and then switch back to a flat face on the upper half. We were extremely fortunate to have a gifted woodcarver and house builder in our group who was there with me for three days before the hands-on workshop began. Together, Chris Naylor and Albie designed a brick layout and did all the cuts to create the bay window layout below the door and then also designed and built a form to create two custom made faceted bay window castable refractory lintels to span the door opening without resting on the door itself. Albie cut all the brick shapes on a rented diamond wet saw (a ten day rental fee was half the cost of a new saw…we almost bought a saw to have it for future projects). Chris made up a plywood template to make sure that each course below the door matched the previous course and Albie cut out the majority of bricks and laid them up dry, course by course, all numbered on work area planks on scaffolding in front of the heater.

Chris went to work measuring and designing and made two beautiful one off forms to create both an inner and an outer course castable refractory set of lintels. Sampsa called the refractory supplier and at my request had some special high temp super strength castable added to our order along with some fine stainless steel needles, so that if cracking developed in the span of the lintel of the door, we would be able to maintain its integrity with the needles. The refractory supplier was a local plant an hour or two away that used products made by Shinagawa. One order of firebrick and other refractory materials arrived but the balance was still missing so we made a special effort to get this second batch of special firebrick splits and refractory concrete and needles all sent on a second order in time for the workshop.

Sampsa wanted his heater to have a stucco finish with possible soapstone trim. With all the curved shapes in the clay stucco around the beautiful window openings, Albie suggested that the front corners of the heater also be rounded so we shaped all the corner brick with locally purchased chisels and hammers and trimmed the corners with a special “Scutch” hammer with a row of galvanized teeth for chipping on its business end. With a planned stucco finish, we knew that we could make a veneer lintel out of the high temp white castable since it would be covered by stucco when that stage of the finish work in the house and the heater was done.

Once the workshop folks started arriving, we poured the two castable lintels. The first was the shape of the inside of the panorama door and was the thickness of the local brick, about 4.5 inches deep. The ends of the shaped lintel were long enough to anchor back into the flat face of the heater. Higher courses would anchor it and keep it from tipping forward and down. The inner or core lintel followed the shape of the outer lintel on its front face and brought the line flat on its back face back to the rectangular core plane that would continue on up to the oven from that point on.  When the castable was poured in the oiled wooden forms the white high temperature castable got so hot that it started to send vapor and odors into the air from the oil finish on the wood (when we later designed and poured an oven lintel set of elements, we decided to pour these elements outside.) While the two piece lintel plan with needles embedded solved the bridging problem, the expansion joint between the two lintels was forward of the eventual front plane of the upper portion of the heater and would show, so we designed and cast a third lintel to cover the two bottom lintels and rest only on the outer lintel to seal off the joint between them but put weight only on the veneer materials, not the core materials. On top of this course we then designed and shaped an oven shelf made out of soapstone which I will discuss in a special Sampsa’s Soapstone blog soon.

Once the bay window base courses were in place, we custom cut the door framing brick courses in a similar fashion but with an opening for the door frame in our dry stack layout.  As Sean and Ian laid up the brickwork, every course was checked with the plywood template (that Chris had made to help create the forms) to check the accuracy of the dry cut brick layout. Once the doorframe brick with the lintels and the soapstone shelf was in place we continued with additional work to anchor the lintels. The door mounting came at a late stage but I will continue with the focus on the door now. The door came with beautiful cast iron “t” shaped anchors that mount on the inside corners of whatever veneer you are working with. All of the Future door series come with this anchoring feature and a braided high temp gasket on the inner face of the doorframe. As you tighten the corner clamps the gasket seals off the whole inner face of the door against the veneer or the core face depending on which face it is mounted. In our case the veneer was a standard 4.5 inch thick New Zealand brick but the bolts supplied with the doors were not long enough. Chris went to the store and bought a length of metric threaded rod the same diameter as the bolts and also bought eight couplings for the rod and bolts (four for the big door and four for the oven door). Sven worked on creating additional lengths with couplings for each door “t” bracket. Each length of rod had to be filed down to make the threads connect properly and this Sven did with one magic tool or another as part of his array of blades on his very elegant Swiss Army knife.

When he pulled out a very functional pliers blade, I was completely won over by his knife. Not happy with just creating extensions for the bolts, Sven went on to cut pipe into short sleeve sections to go over the exposed couplings and galvanized threaded rod and then painted the sleeves with high temp black paint so that the attaching system inside the four corners of the doors looked intentional and elegant. Knowing that we were also going to stucco the outside of the heater eventually so that no red brick would be seen, Sven also went on with small Japanese stucco trowels and put a layer of refractory mortar on the exposed common brick faces inside the door opening. When we went to mount the loading door we noted that we were not quite centered on the heater, so we removed the loading door and trimmed back the left facet of common bricks (soon to be covered with refractory mortar) with a diamond grinder and reset the door in a stable and centered position.

We also mounted it about 10 mm proud of the brick veneer to allow for two layers of stucco to be added later that would build out to the doorframe depth. We had to do this in fact for every clean out door as well as the ash box door. When we were all done with all the door mounts, every door had little shims in place temporarily to hold them out to the proper stucco (to be added later) depth. Once the doors had set up a little, we pulled the shims and carefully put mortar in behind each doorframe to fill up the hidden gap there. We used very narrow pointing trowels for this job.

When we were all done the panorama door was installed and gorgeous, even without any stucco added. Although the door was a technical challenge to mount in the brickwork, we were very happy with our results and were glad that Sampsa had chosen it.

Sometimes, the best teaching happens around a whole group solving problems that the leader has not run into before. In such a circumstance, everyone gets to think and scheme and invent rather than just learning someone else’s system by rote. As I explained early in the course, I have deep experience with one facet of masonry heater design and that there are other traditions of masonry heater design and construction that are also valid that can be pursued. I do not know the Austrian design and calculations system but my son Scott has just taken a weeklong course on this subject with Rod Zander and Tim Seaton in the U.S. and he can now add this knowledge to his own design process when he is challenged to come up with a custom heater for someone. I also mentioned different design traditions from Russia that several people are experimenting with in North America. The idea is to create something that burns cleanly and efficiently and is beautiful that is made out of masonry so that it can store a great deal of heat and radiate it into the room over a half day or longer. In the Finnish heater tradition within which I work, there are still changes and improvements going on. We now make a better Albie core system than we did a few years ago and we are constantly scheming ways to improve on our designs.

The next blog will discuss in detail the design and construction process we used to give Sampsa a custom made firebox with a great deal of over draft area distributed from beneath the firebox and up through the side walls and into the heater through twenty-four one inch ports. We have done such designs in Scott’s little soapstone masonry heater on our Web site and for two clients in the field in 2009 who are reporting good results.

Firebox core elements from Austria feature these over fire air ports and a new cassette designed by our friend Heikki Hyytiainen from Finland, also features this over fire air port air supply. We will be testing Heikki’s new world patented cassette soon in the States and will have a unit at this year’s Wildacres event in Little Switzerland, North Carolina with the Masonry Heater Association. Heikki will be present to build a heater with his high efficiency firebox cassette in it and then I will take the unit home and integrate it into a permanent heater somewhere near home. Far away from home in New Zealand, we had no cassettes or Austrian modular firebox systems. Everything we did, except for the hardware, we designed and built from scratch to maximize the learning curve and to avoid huge shipping fees. This made the course much more technically challenging than normal and much more gratifying ultimately in the end.

Look for the firebox design blog next.

Dear Maine Wood Heat Readers:

Minnesotans have always cherished having a warm hearth to gather around and we’re seeing a strong resurgence of natural stone combined with an appreciation of wood-fired cooking. Wood-fired ovens are already “hot” in the restaurant market. We had a great opportunity to jump into building these ovens in a big way, installing a pair of Le Panyol 180s for the Clyde Park Restaurant in Duluth, MN.

Why did we choose Le Panyol wood-fired ovens?

*  Purity – Since we specialize in working with granite and other stone, we’re biased toward the timelessness, durability and purity of natural materials. In the case of Le Panyol cores, there has been a long record of outstanding performance. Le Panyol oven components are made from Terre Blanche clay, a completely natural material that has been used for food preparation since Roman times.

*  Efficiency – Efficiency comes from the design of the oven core itself. We believe the design of Le Panyol ovens and the door height proportions offer the very best ratios for efficient wood burning combustion. The ovens “charge” very quickly so they are ready to cook faster and they hold heat well, saving on the amount of wood used.

*  People – Any dependable product has to have a great support system. I was very impressed with the passion and expertise that was consistently displayed by the Maine Wood Heat team. In addition to getting hands-on training at their facility in Maine, I received in-depth answers to all my questions along the way and soon realized I was dealing with an elite group of experts in the field of wood-fired ovens. I knew I would get all the support information I needed concerning my own oven installs.

*  Product Information – Finally, I found the Maine Wood Heat Web site to be very educational and helpful. The blog, specs and drawings were very useful for both myself and the building contractor.

We’re glad to be on the Le Panyol team! I always say stonework is hard work but the people, from the team to customers with a vision, make it fun work.

Looking forward to our next Le Panyol wood-fired oven project!

Larry Beaumont

For Marty’s soapstone masonry heater we have added a nice over fire secondary air delivery system. The size, shape and design are very similar to “Scott’s Heater” shown in the masonry heater photo gallery on our Web site. In Marty’s heater, we used many more individually sized smaller soapstone pieces than in Scott’s heater and we capped the stove and created the base stone from a white Vermont marble. The feet have been cut out of red Utah sandstone.

Albie will be delivering the two crates of Marty’s heater to her home four days before the beginning of the annual week long meeting (April 16^th – 23^rd) of the Masonry Heater Association at Wild Acres Retreat Center in Little Switzerland. Black Mountain is about forty-five minutes to an hour South West of Little Switzerland and a bit North East of Ashville. We will begin Marty’s project three days before Wild Acres. Below are photos of Scott’s heater, a few photos of Wild Acres and shots of preparing soapstone for masonry heaters.

This is a wonderful opportunity for beginners and professionals to be part of a short-term, affordable workshop that will create a unique handcrafted masonry heater that will do much to keep Marty happy and warm.

Marty is a highly regarded artist and photographer, dowser, sculptor, teacher, geomancer and labyrinth builder. She has traveled all over the country and the world doing her gentle healing art and work.

Participation is limited to 6 people, and the total cost is $300 per person not including room and board (a $100 discount will be offered to persons also attending the Wildacres event). We will assist workshop participants in finding suitable nearby lodging or camping opportunities and will likely create a potluck lunch together on a daily basis.

For more information about the workshop please contact Albie Barden at albiebarden@mainewoodheat.com.

 

The sun sent a fiery comet crashing to the earth. The comet married the Earth Goddess of the Volcano and they had fire children. She asked the trees to hide her children for her. Some said yes. Some said no. The ones who said yes (like the Spruce Tree of the Eastern Woodlands Abenaki people which you can read about in my previous blog article) became the carriers of the spark of fire.

A traditional Maori crafts teacher using a small stone adz, chips dry shavings off a stick. With another stone tool he scrapes finer shavings off a spindle shaped stick. All of the tinder is gathered in a small stone bowl. A stick about eighteen inches long and about two inches in diameter is propped almost horizontally on a second stick with the high end toward the fire maker. Near his body he has carved a four to six inch long groove into the top of the stick. Using a smaller pointed adz shaped stick, he starts to run the pointed stick back and forth in the groove in washboard fashion. Quite soon, smoke rises from the groove and char begins to form. As the smoke and char increases, the fire maker presses harder and strokes faster. In a minute or two he has a live coal surrounded by char in the groove. He picks the grooved stick up and turns it over and taps the char and live coal into the bed of tinder. Slowly and gently he blows repeatedly into the nest of tinder and live coal. More and more of the tinder starts to glow and quickly, after several breaths, leaps into flame. Every fire made in this way is at some fundamental level, magical.

In European folklore, perhaps the most famous legend of the hearth is the familiar story of Cinderella. Lacking her true mother, she comes into a home with a stepmother and stepsisters who are out of balance with life and giving and the home and fire. They neglect and abuse Cinderella, but when the invitation to the ball arrives, the Goddess (Fairy Godmother) watches over Cinderella and outfits her for the ball. Covered with char and soot like the char in the Maori fire sticks, Cinderella is the one who keeps the embers of the hearth and fire alive. The glass shoes, perhaps crystal, are of course the opposite of soot and char and when the evening of magic and romance is over, the glass slipper survives and is the key for the prince to find his way to his true companion and keeper of the fire of the hearth.

Near the end of the museum tape, the speaker explains that there is a Maori phrase that describes the ones who leave their homes for good, which translates into: “they have let their hearth fire go out.” Home, heart, fire, food: These are the recurring themes in the legends everywhere.

The names of the trees and the players in the legend were all in Maori and although I watched the tape several times, I could only get glimpses of the whole, so I spent a couple of days in Auckland prowling new and use bookstores and the Auckland city library, researching the story of how Mãui gets the fire from the Goddess of the Underworld Volcanoes. He is a mischievous brother who one night takes the fire from his mother’s table and puts it out knowing it will cause trouble in the family but wanting to find out for himself where the fire comes from.

Normally, his mother, who is the keeper of the hearth, goes to get the fire, but Mãui pleads with his mother to let him go get the replacement fire this time. The journey is long and hard and his mother resists his pleas but Mãui persists and his mother finally decides to let him go for fire and gives him the directions for the long journey to the underworld. Mãui sets out eagerly on an arduous three day journey and eventually finds the underground home (”whare”) of the ancient grandmother Fire Goddess, Mahuika. She is very old and wrinkled, but her fingernails and her toenails (or her fingers and toes in some versions of the story) are all burning with flame.

Mãui makes up a story that his brothers had put out the last gift of fire and asks Mahuika for some more. The grandmother willingly sacrifices one of her fingernails of fire and cautions Mãui not to let the fire go out (meaning that he must not abuse the gift of fire). Mãui promises to keep the flame alive, but as soon as he is out the door, he douses the fingernail flame in water and goes back into her whare and asks for another nail. Each time he comes back he has another false story to tell and each time grandmother gives him another fingernail until she has no more. When the fingernails are all gone, she gives him her toenails one by one (the generosity of the Fire Goddess is big) until she is down to her last toenail and her long anticipated anger finally emerges. This time she does not give him the nail and instead let’s loose a conflagration like a volcano that threatens to devour every living thing in Mãui’s world.

In the Auckland museum, there is a large room dedicated to volcanoes with most of the island chain having been formed from volcanic activity over the eons, including volcanoes active in recent times. On a plinth in the center of the room is a cast of a body hunched over and buried alive in the famous eruption of Mt. Vesuvius that destroyed the Roman city of Pompeii and covered it with ash in 79 AD. Buried and preserved in the ruins of Pompeii were many brick ovens, some with bread still in them. The ovens of Pompeii are on display still at the excavated site in Italy. Along side the ovens are huge spool shaped grindstones with horse or human capstan (open ended stone caps on the grindstones). The female open “spool shaped” capstan stone turns over the pointed male base grindstone and as the grain works its way down between the nested stones it spills out as flour onto the base of the stone. A beautiful fresco of a Pompeii baker selling his bread was preserved in the ruins. We found this photo on the left at www.academicfieldtrips.com.

At the Johnson and Wales University Culinary Museum in Providence, Rhode Island, there are two large gold baker’s rings from Pompeii. Each has a brand on the top and bottom of the ring. It is said that each baker branded his bread and that if you could not make out both brands on the finished loaf, then it was not deemed of acceptable quality.

The Le Panyol ovens of Tain L’ Hermitage along the Rhone in France are made in ancient Gaul with Roman coliseums to both the North and South of the little city of Tain. The Terre Blanche clay was well known to the Romans and prized by them for pottery and other uses. The le Panyol ovens are directly descended from the ovens of ancient Roman cities such as Pompeii, as seen in this image (found online at Wikimedia Commons).

When the fire of the Volcano Goddess threatens to destroy Mãui’s mischievous and disrespectful human world, Mãui turns desperately to another deity, the God of the Winds, Tãwhirimãtea, to help him, lying to this God as well. Mãui finds sympathy with Tãwhirimãtea because smoke is stinging his eyes and is making him very uncomfortable up in the sky so Tãwhirimãtea asks the clouds for their help and they agree to bring the rains. And it rains and it rains and it rains, flooding everything until the fires all begin to die out. Before too long, great grandmother Wahuika is left with only three small flames to protect. Here the books provide the names of the three trees who agreed to provide a protective hiding place for the flames. One flame was given to Kaikõmako. One was given to Mãhoe and one was given to Makomako where all three could hide safely.

Once on the South Island in our workshop with my host Chris Naylor and his wife Debbie, we were able to explore the story further and find the three trees in a book on New Zealand trees. On the last day of the workshop, old friends of Chris came by who knew the tradition from college day research on the Maori fire tradition and he suggested that the likely base stick is the Mãhoe and the smaller stick moving fast back and forth in the groove is the Kaikõmako. With time running out at the end of the workshop, I could not acquire the woods to make a kit to bring home, but Chris and his friend and working on this for me.

In creating this hands on workshop on the South Island with client Sampsa Kiuru, we are trying to plant the seed of the Finnish masonry heater and fire holding and keeping tradition in New Zealand soil. Finding the balance with the elemental forces of fire, wind, rain as well as figuring out how to live sustainably on the land where we are is always the challenge. Sampsa’s vision is to not simply to replicate a Finnish tradition in a New Zealand home, but to be a demonstration of how a home and the land around it can be built on green, sustainable permaculture principles. His home (in the photo above), designed by Sarah and Sven Johnston, won a national eco house design competition award which I will speak more of in future blogs. It is of course interesting and important that masonry heaters and highly efficient masonry ovens, like le Panyol, play a legitimate role in this sustainable living vision. We should remember that the Finns did not come to their masonry heater tradition easily. It was the unsustainable loss of Swedish and Finnish forests that prompted King Gustav of Sweden in the l700’s to call for a design competition to improve the system of burning wood from which the contra flow design was created.

Finns were not the first people in Finland. The native people are the Lapps who were pushed further North with their nomadic lifestyle and Reindeer herds. (I am sure there is an interesting myth of fire carrying in that ancient culture as well which I will try to uncover). The Finns have a unique language with some similarity to Hungarian. When the Finns arrived in the Northern forests they lived for thousands of years, basically outdoors around a log fire or in a primitive lean-to. Eventually, simple log homes began to be built. The simplest were one room cabins with no chimney. Just a bed, a table and a stone oven. When the fire was lit in the oven, a smoke flap was lifted in the roof with a pole and the oven was fired. When the room was cleared of smoke, people could return to the room and bake and stay warm from the accumulated heat in the oven. The warmest place to sleep in many instances was on top of the oven. Today’s masonry heater with an upper chamber oven, and perhaps an Albiecore inside, now has a chimney but the high efficiency conservative use of fuel is still the fundamental design principle with fire viewing and baking an additional feature offered in most of our work.

The South Island Finnish masonry heater for Sampsa will push the envelope further on heater design. We are incorporating in the workshop a bay window style panorama door. Additionally, and from scratch, we will be designing and building a secondary air supply system to create a prototype firebox to give the firewood a much higher percentage of overdraft air. Sampsa’s house is built into a hill on two levels and the heater is located on the second level. Sampsa has purchased from Finland, a cast iron top and bottom “needle bed” shiplapped two-plate heat exchanger that sits at the top of the heater in place of the normal castable refractory capping slabs. This masonry heater design using local brick and firebrick sizes will be adapted to our standard heater design with an upper chamber oven and a shelf at the top to receive these heat exchange cast iron panels. Very hot air will be draw off from on top of the gasketed heat exchangers and sucked off into a nearby receiving box with a fan in it and the super heated hot air will wash over a hot water coil before returning much cooler to the cast iron heat exchanger. The hot water will be linked to a radiant floor system and Sampsa will be able to pump heat to his downstairs room and his more remote main level bathroom through the under floor tubing. I have not seen or ever worked with such a system so this will prove to be a good design challenge for everyone in the group.

This illustration shows the externally located hot air to hot water portion of the heat exchanger with the hot and cold air flexible stainless ducts (4 & 5) going to the cast iron (hidden in the heater) “needle bed” heat exchanger at the top of the heater.

Finally, there are rumors that Sampsa has found a source of soapstone on the island, all in rough blocks and he wants to integrate it into the heater somehow. Eight people are signed up for the workshop mostly at the last minute. All will now get a deep immersion experience in masonry heater design and construction.

Roaming through Auckland’s bookstores, I found another wonderful story about fire. This one is from the Native American Montana Salish and Kootenai tribes and is an ancient story retold called “Beaver Steals the Fire” and is published in a beautifully illustrated book. The story tells of the co-coordinated efforts of Beaver, Wren, Coyote, a Muskrat, Eagle, Grizzly Bear, Bull Snake, Frog and others to steal fire from Curlew, the keeper of the fire in the Sky world. When a Beaver successfully steals the fire, Curlew sends down heavy rains to try to put the fire out and punish those who would steal it for their use in the world where all of us live. The Prairie Chicken, who can sit still and unnoticed for many days and weeks on her eggs, volunteers to sit on the last remaining flames to keep them alive until the rains stop and this she successfully does. I purchased “Beaver Steals the Fire” and recommend that you all try to find it in a library or bookstore. I will bring it home to my grandchildren and read it to them. One day, next to a warm masonry heater, they may read this to their own children or grandchildren along with stories like Cinderella and Mãui and the Goddess of Fire.

The Salish and Kootenai author and illustrator have a wonderful teaching section at the end of their book, telling how native people carefully managed the lands they lived on with frequent balanced use of fire to allow prairie grasses and berries to flourish and to generate a wide diversity of wildlife who could forage on the new low lying growth. In Maine, our famous blueberry barrens are similarly managed with fire to keep out other more aggressive plant species. The author notes that our current fear of fire, natural or man-made, stems from our misunderstanding of how to work with fire in a sustainable way. (It turns out, later in my trip that I learned that the Australian natives, for forty thousand years also used fire in a sophisticated ecologically balanced manner). Finally in a wonderful tribute to their story telling tradition, the authors ask that their book be read in the winter months only, when such stories are told. Here I am telling about their wonderful book and story now. It is summer in New Zealand but it is still very much winter in Montana and Maine. You can read wonderful reviews and more about this book at University of Nebraska Press online.

Researching the Mãui fire story, I also learned that the Maori have a traditional earth pit oven. The photo above is featured on a nice Web site (http://www.maori-in-oz.com) full of interesting information. Rocks are heated in a fire and placed in a pit to heat the ground. Food is wrapped in large tropical leaves and placed in the pit, then the pit is covered with earth and leaves and allowed to bake. When the food is done it is pulled out and happily eaten. Great feasts could be prepared in this manner. The stored heat in the earth pit is the same principle used, of course in the le Panyol ovens and all brick ovens. It is also very similar to the ancient Maine Abenaki tradition of the clambake where rocks are heated at the beach on a fire. On top of the hot rocks wet seaweed is placed and layered with lobsters, clams, sweet corn, potatoes and more seaweed. When all the food is baked and steamed, the seaweed is peeled away and everyone enjoys the feast. When the Earnests (see our Web site for their heater also built in a hands on workshop) hosted their daughter’s wedding, the great wedding feast was held on the rocky beach and the northern tip of Chebeague Island, all cooked in a slightly modified clambake fashion. The photo below is a great depiction of this festive tradition, found online at www.ipswichfishmarket.com.

Native peoples of Maine grew corn, beans and squash together. Another tradition, as old as cast iron pots, is the cooking of a great pot of beans in a great “bean-hole” dug in the ground and lined with fired rocks. The great pot of beans and water and molasses is lowered into the ground and covered with more coals and rocks and earth and then allowed to slowly bake for man-hours. To learn more about this tradition, visit People of the Dawn: Bean-Hole Beans.

Demonstrations of this traditional bean-hole cooking are often done at the annual Common Ground Fair in Unity, Maine. When you cross the bridge on 295 leaving Portland, Maine you can often smell the great pots of beans cooking in the big B and M Baked Beans Plant on the shores of Casco Bay. The great pots are still used but the fire is a more “modern” fuel. Every year at the Common Ground Fair, just a hundred yards away from the bean-hole bean demonstration we are baking all day long for three days in one of our mobile le Panyol wood fired ovens and sharing the food with always interested passers by. We do not limit our fare to just beans. We cook cookies, cakes, pies, roasted vegetables, chops, fish, pizzas, pita bread, raised breads, eggs, bacon, and even burgers directly on the Terre Blanche hearth.

Anna Barden happily cooking with our le Panyol wood fired oven at the Common Ground Fair

I’m pretty sure talking about the weather is something we have in common with people all over the world. In which case, we feel very lucky to be in the industry we’re in. As you can imagine, we always have something to talk about – especially during the peak of winter.

One topic of discussion we wanted to open up to our readers is whether or not a masonry heater can or should be built in a basement, and if that is the most efficient place for any wood heat source. As we understand, this is often done with wood stoves in order to save space, and keep wood debris, dust and fuel out of main living areas. Wood stoves, however, work much differently than masonry heaters.

When I was first approached by the idea, I initially cringed at the thought. I haven’t known many basements in my life, but the one I grew up with under my parents farmhouse was and will always be one of the creepiest places I’ve ever been in – the ceilings were incredibly low, cobwebs hung from each rafter, and spiders thrived in the damp environment. Being almost 6 feet tall, going down there to turn on the hot water heater was my definition of pure terror, not to mention when my big brother would “accidently” close and lock the door behind me.

However, my personal experience aside, we don’t advise building a heater in your basement (unless you spend a lot of your time there) for many legitimate reasons, and I’ll explain why.

Masonry heaters are a radiant heater, unlike a regular wood stove, the heat is gentle and moves by a passive convection flow created by the interior contraflow design. This means, once a fire is established in the firebox, smoke and flame then travels up the central fire tube core to the top of the heater. Once it reaches the top of the heater, it separates evenly and travels down both sides of the heater walls, cooling as it falls.

At any level along the face of the heater, the difference between the heating room temperature and the temperature of the cooling gases within the heater are the same. This cycle creates a gentle, balanced airflow in the room – also known as radiant heat. If you stand next to the heater or ten feet away from it, the heat is the same.

For maximum efficiency in terms of heating your home, we always recommend building your heater in the main living area. Building a heater in your basement essentially disrupts this natural heat cycle. The radiant heat will disperse itself through the basement but must have a large enough path to the main living space to allow both warm air to rise and cool air to return to the basement. This is most often times incredibly difficult to achieve.

The ideal layout for efficient heat distribution is installing your wood heat source on the main floor of your home. By utilizing this layout, the lower and upper levels of the house do naturally stay a bit cooler, but for most, cooler bedrooms and basements are actually preferred.

Aesthetics are also a key factor in why we advise building a masonry heater in the center of your home. Each heater is designed to be beautiful inside and out, and are meant to be enjoyed as a place for gathering, warmth and comfort.

Masons can be pretty creative when it comes to building a heater within existing architecture that on the surface may seem insufficient. To find out what your options are, feel free to contact us and we’d be happy to help you determine the most efficient way of heating your home.

If you’re considering building a wood fired oven for your home or business, there are a few things you probably already know – the way the sight, sound, gentle warmth and vitality of fire ignites your spirits, how the wood fired aroma awakens your senses, and the pure excitement you feel when cooking with a live fire.

What you may not know is how to find the perfect match. Over the years, we’ve come to the understanding that a harmonious relationship between a cook and their oven is vital. The connection is a key ingredient in wood fired baking creativity, inspiration and success.

Of all the wood fired ovens available in today’s market, which model will meet your needs and expectations? We can’t speak for everyone, but here are some factors to think about if you’re considering a Le Panyol.

1. Location – If you’re established in one area, and can’t imagine yourself moving anywhere else anytime soon, building an oven into the existing architecture of your home or business is a great option.

On the other hand, for those who never settle, or who may move around, we strongly suggest a model that has the capability to travel along with you. Look into some our turnkey concepts like a portable oven, or the Provence. These ovens are fully assembled and ready to use immediately. They are priced higher than some of our basic oven core packages, but the beauty is you can make the investment without feeling tied down. Enjoy wood fired baking anywhere the road may take you.

2.    Cooking Surface – Choosing a hearth size all depends on the volume of food you’ll be baking on a regular basis. If you’re a professional and need to cook a lot of food in the least amount of time without sacrificing flavor, quality or authenticity, definitely choose a commercial model with a hearth size of at least 12 square feet. If you plan on cooking for a small family, a hearth size of about 3-4 square feet will work well for you. When you’re browsing through different models, just be sure to examine the specs closely because they’ll give you a good sense of the cooking surface and capacities of each oven.

One piece of advice we often give is to not only think about what type of capacity you need now, but also what type of capacity you may need 5-10 years down the road. It’s better to leave room for growth personally or professionally, rather than purchasing an oven that ends up being too small and stifles your potential.

3.    Material – One element we cannot express enough is how important the oven core material is. To achieve the maximum amount of efficiency, we use 100% organic Terra Blanche (white clay) which has unique characteristics unlike other oven core kits available. Compared to terra cotta, dense firebrick, and cold cast refractory concrete, Terra Blanche offers a faster warm up time, incomparable thermal properties, and outstanding efficiency & durability.

This specific material has also been tested to meet all UL 2162, ULC S627-00 and ANSI/NSF 4 standards. This means, food can be placed directly on the hearth tiles because the organic properties do not denature it in any way, not even at high temperatures. Food cooked in a Le Panyol oven is the most wholesome: taste, flavor and aroma are fully preserved.

When researching different oven core materials, definitely keep your eyes peeled for food safety testing, UL and ULC seals of approval.

4.    Design – The design of your oven core is as equally important as the material. Make sure to do your research here. A common mistake is to go with a model that may be less expensive, but also lacks enough mass and capability to absorb and retain the amount of heat needed to cook both evenly and efficiently.

The unique proportions of the Le Panyol dome allows air to enter through the bottom of the oven and circulate naturally, ensuring perfect combustion, while the smoke is expelled through the top. This creates the precise convection airflow to feed your fire, and cook every dish to perfection.

The wall thickness and weight of the core are also very important elements to consider. We find when comparing a Le Panyol to other wood fired ovens on the market that the substantial wall thickness and weight of the Le Panyol core far exceeds those offered by other brands.

When crunching numbers, try dividing the price of the oven by the total weight. Know what you’re getting per pound when comparing brands and narrowing down your options.

5.    Budget – This is a concern that is addressed to us on a daily basis. Our advice is to be careful where you cut costs. Like I mentioned above, while you’re doing your cost analysis just make sure to compare weights, figure out the cost comparison per pound, and take the other factors like design, material, and cooking capacity into consideration before making a final decision.

Another idea in terms of economizing is to consider getting together with family or friends to assemble your oven core. By following our step-by-step construction guide (included free with each oven core package), you could build it on your own with the support and technical assistance from our team or a local mason if you need it.

We hope these tips are helpful as you consider different wood fired oven options for your home or business. Assisting bakers and cooks, from beginners to professionals, in finding the perfect oven is one of our favorite responsibilities here at Maine Wood Heat Company.

Like any new relationship, it’s fun, exciting, and full of wonderful potential.

Michael and Sandy Jubinksy, Founders of Stone Turtle Baking & Cooking School

Wood-Fired Baking & Cooking Classes

Stone Turtle’s classes range from baking pizza, chocolate, pies and tarts, and a wide array of artisan breads. A wood-fired oven intensive has been scheduled for early October, and is a great class for those who are looking to build a wood-fired oven or learn how to expand their baking repertoire past the basics to exquisite wood-fired cuisine.

Stone Turtle is also proud to announce that Richard Miscovich will be teaching a Bread Intensive from March 26–27. Richard is a world-renowned baker and Associate Professor at Johnson & Wales University, who spent many years baking at King Arthur Flour before launching his own business, One Acre Garden & Bakery, in Beaufort, NC. Also on the Bread Bakers Guild of America board of directors, Richard is a leader in both the practice and education of wood-fired baking.

Richard’s course will also prominently feature the Le Panyol Model 120 wood-fired oven we built for Stone Turtle a few years ago. If you’re interested in a Le Panyol, taking Richard’s class or other courses at Stone Turtle, will offer great opportunities to work with our ovens first-hand.

Classes Open to the Young, and the Young at Heart

Classes are open to both professionals and beginners, and they just announced class availability for bakers/cooks between the ages of 15-18.

All classes are hands-on and are limited to 8-10 students, so if any catch your eye, contact Stone Turtle at (207) 324-7558 or email info@stoneturtlebaking.com to register.

*Photo of Richard Miscovich taken by Tessa Burpee

The “thoroughfare” is only a few hundred yards wide. Famous archeological digs at the Turner Farm site indicate, that like the ancient village of Norridgewock, the site seems to have been continuously inhabited for nearly five thousand years.

www.maps.google.com

In the shell middens on Indian Point on the Turner Farm in North Haven, eighteen tons of swordfish bones were recovered. How did the First People hunt these great fish from canoes? Also present in the middens were a large supply of beaver bones indicating a steady trade with trappers and possibly corn growers inland such as in Norridgewock. Just around the corner from Indian Point is a very large and protected shallow clam flat which provided food to residents of the area for millennia. On a Sunday off from work, we watched two films shot thirty years or so ago about the islands. The father of the two brothers who are the general contractors on our job, Shawn and Roman Cooper of Cooper Construction, is featured in one of the films, standing and talking and bent over digging clams with a very wide clam rake on the Island clam flats. European settlers and fishermen displaced the original native people who had called North Haven home for over four thousand years. Today descendants of the first settlers work to maintain a year round community on the island, whose population swells dramatically in the summer.

Out the south facing windows of the home we are working in, we have the same view as the peoples who lived at Indian Point. They were the first to see wind/sail powered boats enter these waters in the fifteen and sixteen hundreds. In the second film that we saw, from the historic photos of the granite quarries of Vinalhaven there were countless working sail powered schooners lined up along the shore. The schooners had long rows of perfectly cut and fitted eight to twelve foot long and two foot diameter granite snow rollers ready for hoisting on board and being moved inland to towns needing a way to flatten their snow covered roads for sleigh travel a century or more ago before the automobile. A retired mason talking about the old quarry days noted that Vinalhaven did not have a single paved road, but they quarried and handmade there on the island, hundreds of thousands of paving stone for city streets along the Atlantic seaboard. The older mason then proceeds to quickly trace around a block a single line and once around places a little chip of granite on the line, and strikes it once on the chip. With the chip pulverized, he strikes the stone a second time and the cobble stone block breaks into two perfect paving blocks. With typical Maine understatement, he talks about how “clever” the early Vinalhaven stone workers were by taking us out to some of the local fabricated elaborate gravestone pieces still in the cemetery.

The quarries are closed and much of the shipbuilding has ceased, but the hand skills and the values are all still intact in an amazing way on the islands and it is an honor to work with people from this rich tradition of craftsmanship. One of the young carpenters we are working with has a pilot’s license and a lobster boat. He has mastered many skills to stay alive and at home on the island.

The Norridgewock and the North Haven first peoples picked good protected South facing sites with readily available food supplies. The North Haven people had the clam flats and rich fisheries. The Norridgewock people also had migrational fisheries and lots of game and at some point added their flint corn with squash and beans as staples of their economy and diet. Today when you look out to the South from Indian Point a new demonstration of Wind Power gracefully dominates the view. Three huge windmills with blinking red lights at night on top, turn slowly all day and all night long and are producing enough power to carry the load of both islands with plenty to spare. Here twelve miles out, is the hope of energy independence, sustainable energy and off shore (although on an island) wind that everyone has been talking about recently.

Travel around the island today is primarily by truck or car. There are no buses and in the winter no bicycles. The cottage and grocery store where we are staying is heated by a large outdoor boiler that burns mostly spruce from the island that has died standing and has been taken down and recycled into use as a valuable dry fuel. The owners or their employees get up once or twice at night to fuel the boiler and the boiler carries several buildings on the property. The savings in imported fuel is great but the cost in pollution is also genuine because the boilers installed on the island in the past few years were the first generation unregulated boilers that did not begin to meet the new tough EPA standards on outdoor boilers. In the past two generations we have finally become aware that the water cannot be used as an open sewer and now strict regulations on over board discharge and septic systems and the like, keep our human waste controlled and out of other fragile parts of the ecosystem. We have still not learned this lesson about the air and because the sky is so great and because we cannot see and really feel our connection to it or understand our dependence on its cleanliness, we are continuing to treat the air as a free open sewer with increasingly dire results.

The young generous electrician on the job, who offered me the use of one of his clam rakes, admits that he uses one of the early dirty burning boilers which he is very happy with even though he knows it is very polluting. When this first generation of wood boilers is retired, the next generation that replaces it will be a lot cleaner for everyone’s benefit. When we bought oysters from a local man, Adam Campbell, who has an oyster farm on a brackish lagoon behind a dike that floods from the ocean twice a day, he pointed out that his aquaculture operation, at first feared as a polluter, turned out to be the engine for cleaning up the fresh water pond or lagoon when it was determined that eight households around the pond were dumping raw sewage or leaking sewage into it. Now the oysters are happy and safe and children who swim there are safe as well. Adam Campbell’s oysters are so good, that a mainland carpenter friend of mine took the ferry out with another friend and drove out to Adam’s farm to buy 300 of his oysters for a big party they were hosting back on the mainland that night. Although the lobster season is mostly over, Adam willingly ventured out to his lobster boat where he had a crate of lobsters in the water, and he brought us back two of the sweetest lobsters I have ever tasted.

Most people heating with alternative fuel on the island are using wood stoves. One man was at the general store loading up his station wagon with a hundred or more pressed dried wooden large burnable brick, much denser and less messy than standard split cordwood. But even this fuel must be processed somewhere and shipped over by ferry. I do not think that anyone on the island has ever built a wood burning masonry heater. The majority of the larger homes on the island are used primarily in the summer and do not require a source of winter wood heat. The Turner Farm home, however, is being rebuilt as a year round sustainable home using local resources of wind and wood as sustainable fuels. Eventually, it is hoped that the revitalized Turner Farm will produce significant quantities of organic produce and livestock for local consumption.

One of the masons on the job from Vermont brought with him an issue of the New Yorker from Dec. 2l/28, 2009 with an article in it called Hearth Surgery. In the article the work of many many people from around the world to develop very low cost heating and cooking devices for the majority of the world’s very poor populations, is beautifully documented. Making these devices clean and affordable would accomplish a great deal in improving world health and the health of the atmosphere. Please read this article online or at your library if you can find it.

In Maine while we still have heated homes, it is important that we try to find ways to make masonry heating more affordable with designs that use readily available materials and less complicated skills to build. We are hoping to continue our work with simpler low cost masonry heaters in an ongoing way in the future as we have in the past with metal skinned prototypes and our flue tile heaters.

The big challenge is doing this low cost work in our spare time which we have so little of. One of our new clients has his sights set on a grant proposal for us to work with a Maine manufacturer to develop some lower cost modular heater prototypes. We will keep you posted on our progress. Meanwhile, we will continue our work on the gorgeous brick see-through heater and cooker we have started on North Haven. In a major power outage when nothing electrical is working, our masonry heater and cooker will easily carry the heating and cooking needs of the home.

Light up a Le Panyol…

And bring out the best in wood fired baking. Whether you’re cooking homemade breads, pies, cakes, steaks, fish, chops, pizza on the hearth, our indoor and outdoor wood fired brick ovens bring friends and family together year round.

Each of our Le Panyol residential and commercial brick ovens are:

* 100% organic – Le Panyol ovens are made of 100% “Terre Blanche” clay. You can bake the best breads, crispy, chewy pizza crusts, and succulent roasted meats right on the hearth tiles. Feel confident knowing that what goes into your oven, is as pure when it comes out.

* Heat efficient - The real magic of the “Terre Blanche” lies in its unique insulative properties. By balancing the stored and radiant energy of a fire, a Le Panyol comes online quickly and holds heat longer, consuming 1/2 to 1/4 of the fuel required by other ovens.

* Authentic – The unique Le Panyol “orange wedge” dome and more than 150 years of flue and door structure refinement create precise convection airflow to feed your fire and cook every dish to perfection!

Contact us for more information about our Le Panyol wood fired brick ovens by filling out our online form.

 

These social gatherings make up some of our fondest memories over the past thirty years we’ve been in business. As we grow and explore ways to reach new customers, and keep in touch with those we’ve met along the way, we realized we weren’t fully taking part in one of the most organic, exciting social centers of this day in age…networks on the World Wide Web.

In the late 1970’s when we started our business, we certainly never thought we’d be “tweeting.” Tweets were the sound that came from our windows and got us out of bed in the morning. They were songs we heard while walking through the fields surrounding our farmhouse or along the banks of the Kennebec River. We had friends that we could probably call fans, but our “profile” consisted of the office number in an antiquated phone book.

So here we are in 2010, stepping proudly into the realm of Facebook and Twitter. As the social beings that we are, this is an exciting new step for us. We have the opportunity to deliver helpful, interesting, relevant information to fellow aficionados of masonry heaters or wood fired ovens, to share what we know, and hopefully learn from the new friends we meet.

Despite our efforts to reach out to you on the Web, we are still traditional at heart. We hope you become our fan on Facebook, or follow our “tweets,” but we’d be just as happy if you gave us a call, or even stopped by our Web site again soon.

As folks often say in Maine, “We’ll leave the light on for yah.”

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